Hollywood Park's official bugler, Jay Cohen, calls horses to the track which staged its last card this weekend. Photograph: Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

Shortly after 01.35 GMT on Monday morning, a horse will pass a winning post in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and Hollywood Park, which opened in 1938, will have staged its final race. A track which includes Seabiscuit, Affirmed, Swaps, Seattle Slew and Citation on its roll of honour, and which was home to Zenyatta in her racing days, will stand empty for just a few weeks until the wreckers arrive. A $2bn (£1.25bn) development of homes, shops, offices and hotels will replace a course which, for a decade in the 50s and 60s, had the highest annual attendance in the USA.

Humans are social creatures, and sentimental too, so the loss of any racecourse – in fact, anywhere that people have often gathered to enjoy themselves – is always a cause for sadness and regret. When Folkestone and Hereford closed within a few weeks of each other this time last year, thousands turned up to say goodbye, remember the good times and those who had shared them. The sense of loss was shared but also personal.

The closure of a racecourse as historic as Hollywood Park has a wider significance too. When Walthamstow closed in 2007, it felt like the moment when the slow, steady decline in greyhound racing's popularity could suddenly be seen as irreversible. Hollywood is not as important to American racing as the Stow was to British dogs, and the United States racing industry will remain the world's largest for years to come. With Hollywood gone, however, it may now be possible to hear the clock ticking.

When you make a living from horseracing, or just follow it with the all-consuming passion of many racegoers and punters, it is easy to carry on as if the wider world barely matters at all. But it is simply part of a much wider tapestry, and on the occasion of its demise, it is worth noting that from start to finish, Hollywood Park's story reflects the steady evolution of the society which surrounds it.

It was founded, in 1938, by Harry and Jack Warner, of Warner Bros fame. It might seem scarcely credible now but they did so because Santa Anita, which had opened about 20 miles away in Arcadia in 1934, did not welcome Jews in the clubhouse. In all, there were 600 founding shareholders, including many of the studio's most famous faces, which gave Hollywood a priceless sprinkle of stardust and guaranteed large and loyal crowds from the off.

In the years after the second world war, Hollywood Park boomed along with California and the rest of the US. It reached the top of the pile, ahead of tracks such as Santa Anita, Churchill Downs and Belmont Park, in the annual attendance league, but when racing as a whole started to fall out of favour with the American sporting public in the 1970s, it had further than any of them to fall.

Even when the decision was taken to close Hollywood Park, leaving the economic powerhouse of California with only two major tracks, at Santa Anita and Del Mar, it was still, according to its president, showing a small annual profit. It was not enough of a profit to justify – in brutal, economic terms – the use of such an immense tract of real estate for a minority sport when the alternative would generate many times more. Despite all its history and the pleasure it had brought to millions over the course of 75 years, when it faced up to economic reality, Hollywood Park was defenceless.

Could it happen to a major track in Britain? It nearly did, in the mid-1970s, when Aintree – which has a strikingly similar, urban location – came within a whisker of being turned into a housing estate. Like Hollywood Park, Aintree was swallowed by a major conurbation which tilted the economics of land use towards development rather than leisure.

The memory of how close the sport came to losing the venue of the world's most famous steeplechase shows that there is no room to be complacent. None the less, Aintree survived and then thrived, and will stage the first £1m Grand National in April.

There were several key individuals, groups and businesses involved in the rescue, including the Jockey Club, which now owns the course, and Ladbrokes, who sponsored it at its time of greatest need. There was also a genuine sense in the country as a whole that something important was in danger of being lost.

At least 95% of the British population has no interest in horseracing but that does not mean that they don't know it is there. There is a far greater acceptance too that betting can be a leisure activity and not merely a vice, for all that the traditional image of the high street bookie is, for now at least, being poisoned by their aggressive promotion of roulette and other fixed-margin casino games.

British racing's ability to talk itself down should never be underestimated but 2014 is widely expected to see a record prize-money total, attendances still at or around six million, and a £1m National. Those who knew and loved Hollywood Park would feel fortunate to have half as much to anticipate.